When an Abstract Artist Falls in Love With Monet

‘Monet/Kelly’ at Clark Art Institute, Ellsworth Kelly Falls for Monet

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Love can be counterintuitive. If I were asked to pair up the artist Ellsworth Kelly with a historical soul mate, Claude Monet would not readily come to mind. The American painter of abstract pictures as clean as Shaker tables and the French Impressionist who piled on pigment as thick as mulch? I don’t think so. Yet here they are together in a small, crystalline show called “Monet/Kelly” at the Clark Art Institute, and they make an utterly logical, and mind-stretching, match.

What do they have in common? France, for one thing. Mr. Kelly lived there for six years studying art on the G.I. Bill after World War II. He was mostly in Paris, but traveled around. In 1949, he spent a working vacation in a fisherman’s cottage on Belle-Île, off the Brittany coast, where he produced, among other things, a series of spare pencil drawings of that island’s cliffs and headlands jutting into the sea. Although he may not have been aware, some 60 years earlier Monet had spent four months in the same place painting the same terrain.

Mr. Kelly’s interest in Monet began later, in 1952, when he chanced on some of the panoramic waterlily paintings called “Nympheas” in a museum in Zurich. Intrigued by the idea of near-abstract art done on so large a scale, he visited Monet’s Giverny home. There was no one else there. Monet, who had died in 1926, was out of fashion in France. His beloved water gardens were overgrown; his studio was a ruin, with birds flitting in and out. A few waterlily paintings were still propped on easels; other, later garden pictures, done after Monet’s eyesight had failed, stood stacked against the walls.

Although these passionately painted images of nature taken to the edge of legibility were at an opposite extreme from the art Mr. Kelly was developing — matte, monochromatic paintings that had sources in reality but left all trace of depiction out — he found himself moved by them. The next day, back in Paris, he painted an abstract picture that mingled green and blue, with strokes so subtly feathered that the blue looked like shadows under water. He had never done anything like it before, and never would again.

Titled “Tableau Vert,” it was a homage to the older artist. It hangs, along with another painting and 18 drawings by Mr. Kelly and nine paintings by Monet, at the center of an exhibition that is also a homage, and something more. With every work in it chosen and installed by Mr. Kelly, it’s also a visual essay about his own art as personal response to other art and to the world.

Three of Monet’s paintings at the Clark date from his 1886 stay on Belle-Île, where he was mesmerized by the wind-and-sea-carved rock formations that rose, like mini-islands, offshore. He returned to them repeatedly and their character changes from picture to picture. In one, the rocks are soft, squat, spongy mounds lapped by eddying water; in another, they’re dark dorsal fins sticking up from storm-lashed waves. In a third they’re almost peripheral objects, pushed aside to frame an expanse of cobalt-flecked green sea.

The colors, which swirled later through the Giverny water-garden series, bring “Tableau Vert” to mind. And though Mr. Kelly’s painting was a one-off, his relationship with Monet continued and intensified. In 1965, he returned to Belle-Île and made landscape drawings, as he had in 1949, but now with a mission. The new images are of specific rock formations that Monet had painted, each done, as if with single stroke, in contour profile and set in sea-and-sky, a space defined by a horizon line.

Finally, in 2005, Mr. Kelly came back once more to the island and drew the same subjects, but in a changed style. The rocks are now more than traced shapes. They’re fleshed out with shading that gives them volume. They seem organically planted in space. They look alive, charged with creaturely feelings, like mountains in a Taoist painting. Interestingly, this vivacity may come partly because Mr. Kelly’s drawing hand in 2005, when he was in his early 80s, was less steady than it had been decades earlier, giving his lines a little shimmy. Also, he seemed to be less intent on distilling abstract essences from actual forms than in staying with the forms themselves, dwelling on their particularities, deliberating over their details.

We see a comparable dynamic in six glorious late Monet Giverny paintings that are in the show, dating from around 1907 to the year before his death at 86. Over their span Monet’s eyesight is deteriorating, but his painting, far from growing vague or lightening up, becomes denser and more adamant. The less well he could see, the more his hand did, laying down strokes on top of tangles of strokes.

This is very tenacious, insistent art. In “The Path Under the Rose Arches,” from around 1920-22, Monet is depicting reality almost entirely through touch. And he keeps touching, won’t stop, won’t let go. You can easily understand why, for Mr. Kelly, whose abstract art is so committed to and embedded in the world, that first Giverny visit was a kind of love-at-first-sight experience.

It’s also not difficult to interpret the show — which includes drawings by Mr. Kelly of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire — as a meditation on age and how it can alter perception and practice, leading a realist like Monet toward what looks like abstraction and bringing an abstract artist like Mr. Kelly back to the material realities from which his art has always sprung. Lest a focus on age and aging prevail, however, Mr. Kelly, who is 91, rounds out the show with a recent painting, “White Curve in Relief Over White (Belle-Île),” from 2013.

In the context of what surrounds it, this piece — two white-painted joined canvases, one a semi-oval, the other a triangle pointed down — suggests a distillation of the island landscape that two artists, so alike and unalike, shared. More important, it confirms Mr. Kelly’s status as a figure whose true breadth and depth have yet to be fully measured, and whose art continues to be what it has always been, the ever-ardent product of an old soul.

A version of this review appears in print on February 2, 2015, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: When an Abstract Artist Falls in Love With Monet. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe